There is no sun without shadow. There is no shadow without sun.

Higgins Versus Klosterman IX: Vampire Weekend

It’s the evening before your wedding. Everything is going as planned; you are spending the afternoon with a few old friends, chatting casually. Suddenly, your spouse-to-be burst into the room, totally hysterical. He/she insists he/she has just seen a vampire. When you ask what this means, he/she says: “I was looking out of the window of my hotel room, and I could see into the apartment building across the street. That’s when I saw the vampire. I saw a man in a black cape bite a woman’s neck and drink her blood. I know this must sound crazy, but I am that certain what I saw is real.” Your prospective (and sober) spouse is in a state of panic and pleads with you to believe the story. You can tell that this is really, really important to him/her.

Knowing the fragility of the situation and the intensity of the timing, do you tell your potential spouse that you do, in fact, completely believe that he/she saw a vampire across the street? (All of your old friends are watching this conversation.)

First off–aren’t I glad she seems to have seen a proper vampire, and not one of those sparkly Twilight ones? A cape–this vampire knows his place.

Jokes aside, I am not going to take this lightly. Whether or not someone has really had their neck bit and their blood sucked, the situation is pretty serious. On the one hand, if the encounter is imagined, my future spouse is hallucinating. This is probably something I want to know now. No use finding out later. On the other hand, if the encounter is real, well, my spouse has most likely just witnessed a murder–maybe a serial killer, since I don’t think people like this get off on doing it just once.

To that end, I think you have to take the future spouse at his/her word and act as if things are serious. If you’re worried about looking silly in front of your friends–well, one, pretty sure my friends would just be psyched to go vampire hunting. But you can rationalize it, just as I’ve done above, aloud if you like.

The only logical next step is to find out, if at all possible, whether the act your spouse claims to have witnessed really did occur. To those who would dismiss this outright–are you really going to discount the weirdos of the world and say there’s not someone out there drinking blood right now? After all, Santa Cruz had 3 confirmed vampire encounters in 2008 alone!

He/she hopefully can identify the room across the way that the supposed assault took place in. What remains is to investigate. If a body is found, you know your spouse is sane, and you can go ahead with the wedding (as long as you don’t think the vampire will come for you next). If no body is found, though–that’s when you face a serious dilemma. There are only two possibilities I can think of:

your future spouse is seeing things, perhaps as a result of undisclosed mental illness or drug use

your future spouse is testing you to see if you trust them, in which case they may be waiting until you commit fully, ie marry, to tell you they were lying

If it’s #1, you’ve got a tough choice (and you wouldn’t know it was #2 until after you’ve made your choice, anyway). I guess it comes down to the individual case. Do you already have reason to think she/he might be a little bit batty? Or do you love that your future spouse might be a little cray-cray?